1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to a method, system and program product for automatically retrieving documents. Specifically, the present invention allows numerous documents to be simultaneously retrieved from disparate locations based on an input file of document requests.
2. Background Art
As the implementation of computers in business increases, the electronic archival of documents becomes more pervasive. Typically, documents that have been archived must be retrieved on a regular (e.g., daily) basis for a multitude of reasons such as reprinting, legal requests, customer inquiries, deferred processing, etc. The quantity of documents that are requested can vary depending on the type of request made and the quantity of requesters making the requests. For example, several thousand (e.g., 30,000) documents may be requested individually by several thousand customer service representatives in approximately the same time frame. In other cases, it might be necessary to retrieve millions of documents in a short amount of time so that, for example, CD-ROMs can be generated. In any event, it is important for the documents to be retrieved by the required time.
Heretofore, retrieval of documents has been an inefficient and time consuming process. Specifically, many previous systems required the requesters to individually request each desired document. Moreover, many previous systems required the requestor to manually access the storage locations to electronically retrieve the documents. Such requirements can be unduly tedious when the documents are stored over a network. In particular, many businesses implement computer networks that could include several disparate servers and workstations. Moreover, the documents could be stored on various storage media such as hard disks, tapes, drives, etc. Thus, identifying the storage locations alone could be a time consuming task.
In view of the foregoing, there exists a need for a method, system and program product for automatically retrieving documents. Specifically, a need exists for a hit list of documents to be generated based on an input file of requests. A further need exists for the hit list to be processed according to system, data object, storage node, storage drive and/or cache. Still yet, a need exists for each document in the processed hit list to be retrieved in parallel from their respective storage locations.